It may not have been well-publicised in Europe, but the combination of the sudden temporary resolution and de-escalation of the tariff imbroglio between the United States and China has gone a considerable distance to legitimising the apparently brusque method of President Trump’s policy to eliminate the completely unjustifiable and ultimately unsustainable US trade imbalance of $1.2 trillion.

The contemporaneous revelations of higher than expected job creation in the United States and substantially lower than expected inflation have been, at the least, a serious temporary embarrassment of those commentators in Europe and America who have been shrieking alarms as if their hair was on fire about where Trump’s policies might lead. In the first day of his visit to Saudi Arabia, where he announced his expectation of the confirmation of $600 billion to be invested in the US and the crown prince topped that up to over $1 trillion; all this augers powerfully for the success of his slightly unorthodox economic policies.

The American trade deficit arose because of the strategically justifiable Cold War policy of incentivising politically unreliable or vulnerable countries to align themselves with the US and its allies and not with its Sino-Soviet opponents. The end of the Cold War made this policy obsolescent, but like almost all public policy, it had a momentum of its own and carried the American trade deficit to unheard of depths before the frontal assault of the present administration. There is no doubt that many countries were singly or collusively conducting a comprehensive pocket-picking exercise against the US, which is such an economic powerhouse that the world surplus on trade with the US was largely reinvested in that country — its economy is after all so large that there was no significant concern about the level of foreign ownership that resulted.